George Pitcher is an Anglican priest who serves his ministry at St Bride's, Fleet Street, in London – the "journalists' church".

BT's Open Reach takes us back to the Seventies

A small but significant hangover from the snow : Here in Sussex, we're still waiting for Open Reach, "A BT Company", to re-connect us after a tree fell across our broadband line, removing all internet and fixed-line telephone access from Pitcher Towers.

Here's the thing about Open Reach: It's neither open nor has reach. You can't phone to speak to anyone at Open Reach. It owns and services the nation's telecoms network, but any maintenance has to be arranged by your service operator, in our case the ever-diligent SCS. So that leads to the Alice-in-Wonderland requirement of phoning Open Reach to be told that we have to phone SCS, so they can phone Open Reach to arrange an engineer. Two weeks tomorrow the line came down – I think the excuse of the snow has long expired.

It seems to me that BT's Open Reach is symptomatic of two service-industry ills in Britain. First, it's a service company that has no direct customer contact; that's a recipe for sub-soviet style arrogance and neglect. Second, it's a symptom of the over-enthusiastic privatisation of the Eighties. BT was sold off effectively as a monopoly and has been pretending not to be one ever since to satisfy the regulator. That's why Open Reach is allegedly "separate" from BT, but can behave with all the disdain for customer-service that the old nationalised industry had.

The line fell across a main road and is officially designated "dangerous". Has Open Reach been on our mobiles indicating what it intends to do? Has it given priority to ensuring that road-users are protected from a stray line flapping across the thoroughfare? Don't make me laugh. Apparently it's working through a "backlog" because of snow that disappeared 48 hours ago and was never that impenetrable anyway.

Sometimes you don't have to be cast in Life on Mars to feel you're back in the Seventies.